There is a point in the ‘If You See What I See’ exhibition in the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, northern Denmark, where you land in front of what at first looks like several blown-up photographs of children sleeping. Look closer, and you realise they are actually videos: you can see their bodies move with their breath, and eventually, some of them roll over, stretch or wake up. The caption tells you they are Ukrainian children who were deported to Russia (the work was produced by Kyiv-based artists Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk).
It’s a powerful artwork within an exhibition that explores challenging themes of separation, loneliness, hope and desire. But this exhibition wasn’t curated by an art historian; instead, it was put together by Danish fashion designer Stine Goya — better known for creating sculptural womenswear in dopamine-bright colours and prints. On Friday night, Goya hosted her Autumn/Winter 2025 show amid the artworks, rounding off this season’s Copenhagen Fashion Week (CPHFW).
Hosting the event in Aalborg showed a certain flex: the 40 editors and friends of the brand that attended stayed on an extra day — the rest of the CPHFW shows wrapped on the Thursday — and took a four-hour train journey from the capital to Aalborg, some returning late that night.
“It’s quite unique to get the chance to have a show inside an exhibition, among artworks that you have chosen yourself within a theme that you have chosen, which you feel is relevant to you and to the world that we live in right now,” says Goya. “It felt very natural to bring people here [to Aalborg].”
Kunsten invited Goya to curate the exhibition around 18 months ago, and it opened to the public in November 2024. “We were thinking about how to approach our collection in new ways and how to encourage new perspectives,” said chief curator Caroline Nymark Zachariassen in a speech on Friday, ahead of the show. “Often, when you visit an art museum, you will see a very chronological hang of the permanent collection. We thought it could be fun to do it differently.”
